I'm getting to grips with my Raidon NAS (SL3620) and beginning to post on this forum.  An obvious question from a Noob, and one that I don't see addressed is

1) What are the benefits of tinky over an above the Linux distro that these devices have?
2) What about gentoo vs tinky?

Hi from a purely personal experience, the benefit of Tinky over the stock embedded OS included in my NAS (DUAL SATA) was:

1. Install additional IPKG packagas
2. More useful packages included by default, such as SSH server.
3. Most importantly, from my perspective, Tinky allows one to persist changes to configuration files and other aspects on the filesystem. For example startup scripts, cron jobs and so on.  This is achieved by saving data to disk before reboot, and then coping them back in the RAMDISK when it reboots. Very clever

I never installed Debian/Gentoo on my DUAL Sata NAS, but I suppose doing so would give you the benefits of having a full Linux disto, with access to their package management repositories.

I doubt I could get it to work out of the box as my ext2 fs is encrypted.. But what is the performance like? In terms of MB/s upon samba transfers/ftp..